Our Founders' Warning. Strobe Talbott
“He, who loves God, cannot endeavor that God should love him in return.”16
There was no heavenly shepherd looking out for mortals and caring for them in the eternal life to come. It was this kind of blunt, unsparing assertion that led the British scholar Jonathan Israel to call Spinoza “the supreme philosophical bogeyman of Early Enlightenment Europe.”17 Steven Nadler takes a more expansive view: “Spinoza has a rightful place among the great philosophers in history. He was certainly the most original, radical, and controversial thinker of his time, and his philosophical, political, and religious ideas laid the foundation for much of what we now regard as ‘modern.’ ”18
Spinoza lived during the emergence of deism, a movement that attempted to integrate theology and science, belief and reason. Instead of worshiping the Lord of Heaven and the scriptures, deists accepted a creator of the universe who does not interact with humanity. Although the movement was roundly condemned in the seventeenth century, it appealed to many figures of the European Enlightenment and to many leaders of the American Revolution in the eighteenth.
As Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote in The Miracle at Philadelphia, her widely read account of the Constitutional Convention in 1787: “Deism was in the air. Two generations ago it had made the westward crossing, to the immense perturbation of the faithful. Here was a religion free of creed: the Newtonian universe, the classical revival, the discovery of new seas and new lands had enlarged the world but crowded the old dogma rudely.”19
Spinoza, who crowded it more rudely than anyone, remained a name that was rarely whispered except by the bravest freethinkers (Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson). It took the German Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and its Jewish spin-off to appreciate where Spinoza’s relentless logic had taken him. On both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century, some Jewish congregations treated Spinoza with the same interest and respect as they did Maimonides.20
Modern deists often claim Albert Einstein as one of their own. He demurred, being drawn instead to the outcast Jew who posited divinity not as a supreme being but as the essence of all creation existing in nature, animate or otherwise. This would encourage Einstein to pursue the unified field theory even though it remained elusive—or perhaps because it was elusive. Spinoza’s God could coexist with Einstein’s universe.21
In contrast with Spinoza’s mind-bending metaphysics, his views on liberal government were down-to-earth. They were also ahead of his time. More than most Enlightenment philosophers, he studied the masses, combining empathy for the downtrodden and awareness of the danger to society if they were ignored. In Ethics, he urged the political powers and the intelligentsia to pay attention to the populace’s emotions, especially their fear and frustration.
He elaborated in the Theologico-Political Treatise, one of his works published in his lifetime: “In a Free Republic everyone is permitted to think what he wishes and to say what he thinks.”22 In this work, published anonymously, Spinoza also defended freedom of speech as a corollary to sovereignty of the individual: “If, then, no one can surrender his freedom of judging and thinking what he wishes, but everyone, by the greatest natural right, is master of his own thoughts, it follows that if the supreme powers in a republic try to make men say nothing but what they prescribe, no matter how different and contrary their opinions, they will get only the most unfortunate result.”23 Moreover, if the authorities of the state tried to muzzle free expression, it would backfire, possibly in rebellion: “It simply couldn’t happen that everyone spoke within prescribed limits. On the contrary, the more the authorities try to take away this freedom of speech, the more stubbornly men will resist.”24
Elsewhere, he reiterated the key component of a social contract: “The end of the Republic … is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or automata, but to enable their minds and bodies to perform their functions safely, to enable them to use their reason freely, and not to clash with one another in hatred, anger, or deception, or deal inequitably with one another.”25
Ever the realist, he urged that a sturdy government must have enough processes and institutions to survive periods of malfeasance: “For a [state] to be able to last, its affairs must be so ordered that, whether the people who administer them are led by reason or by an affect, they can’t be induced to be disloyal or to act badly.”26
By “administration,” Spinoza meant sturdy institutions of government that would restrain incompetent, harmful, or overbearing rulers. This principle would find its way into the heart of the American Constitution in the form of federalism and separation of powers.
Spinoza was a liberal with no romantic illusions of rebellion or populist rule. If the populace is ignored, upheaval will ensue: “Tyranny is most violent where individual beliefs, which are an inalienable right, are regarded as criminal. Indeed, in such circumstances, the anger of the mob is usually the greatest tyrant of all.”27
His advice for dealing with populists and their adherents reads well today: elites should get over their snobbish notion that the hoi polloi are ignorant and unfit to judge what is good for the polity or themselves. “[E]veryone shares a common nature,” he asserted, suggesting that elitism was a dubious category, especially if the intellectual class determined what was good for the “inferiors.”28
In this regard, Spinoza was wary of his own profession. If his fellow philosophers in their cloisters continued to extol cool reason and dismiss the passions of the crowds on the streets, as was their wont, they would stir up resentment and incite demagoguery. To avert that, he put the onus on government and the elites themselves. In their civic roles, they should study the people’s lives and needs.
Spinoza’s quest took him to a distant, lonely corner of the philosophical universe in a relatively short life. He died at the age of forty-four, about the average lifespan of a seventeenth-century European.29 In death, he would become part of God/Nature. A passage from the Ethics serves as a fitting epitaph: “A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is to meditate not on death but on life.”30 It took several generations for Spinoza to be widely rediscovered, mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and, in some cases, reinterpreted for purposes that would be alien to his philosophy.31
John Locke was born the same year as Spinoza and shared fundamental beliefs with this bold outsider, notably the inalienable rights of all human beings, including the right to rebel against tyranny. However, Locke was a proper Anglican. He welcomed the patronage of aristocrats, who, in turn, might have looked dubiously on his work had they known Locke was influenced by a renegade Jew with a reputation as a pagan.32
While Spinoza was a shooting star in the firmament of the Enlightenment, Locke’s ascent started gradually. After studying medicine at Oxford, Locke entered an upper-class medical practice before turning to epistemology and political philosophy. He wrote slowly, meticulously, and prolifically. And because of the dangerous Stuart reign, with its entangled power plays between Crown and Parliament and between Protestantism and a revived Catholicism, he wrote discreetly, encrypting his notes and hiding manuscripts in a secret compartment of his desk. Such precautions did not, however, remove him from suspicions that he was plotting against the Crown, so Locke slipped off to Holland, the most liberal nation in Europe.
Algernon Sidney, a reformist parliamentarian and political theorist, was protesting the divine right of kings, much as Locke made that case in the same period. But Sidney was less discreet and fortunate. In 1683 he was accused of conspiring to assassinate Charles II. He was arrested, and a draft of his treatise justifying revolution was confiscated.33 Sentencing Sidney to death, the presiding judge proclaimed “Scribere est agere” (To write is to act). Sidney’s response from the scaffold resonates today: “We live in an age that makes truth pass for treason.”
Locke’s self-exile in his fifties could have been an anticlimax to what seemed a middling career: a lapsed physician turned into a brilliant but skittish philosopher. Most of the evidence